My latest “musical experiment” is with Clementine, which was recently added to Debian.

I should note things that I have used in the past, and some areas of past pain:

XMMS

Which has often been nice enough, but which has grown long in the tooth.

XMMS2

Which takes the desirable step of being a client/server system which admits the availability of a bunch of backends. I have, when using it, tended to prefer the shell backend.

Amarok

An “all singing, all dancing” option…

It uses KDE, which I’m historically not terribly keen on

It has libraries that are evidently clever enough to pull music off my iPod Touch as long as it’s plugged into a USB dock

It has the “KDE integration” that seems to want to have widgets integrating into some “KDE-compliant” window manager. I’m running StumpWM, which is decidedly not a KDE thing, so controlling Amarok always seems like a bit of a crapshoot…

I have played a bit with the “playlist” functionality; it hasn’t yet agreed with me…

At any rate, I saw Clementine listed as “new in Debian,” so thought I’d take a peek. I’m liking what I see thus far:

Onscreen widgets for all the sorts of things that need to be controlled, including

Managing music library, so as to add things

Like Amarok, it can see my iPod whenever it’s plugged in, and can play that music through the computer

It easily grabbed album covers (I’m not sure what service it’s using) for most of my music

Onscreen controls seem pretty reasonable, though I kind of wish the volume control was larger, as that’s something one wants most frequently to fiddle with.